Connecting with real clients, we engaged with The Patrician Academy School in Mallow. In the first stage students had the option of choosing from one of three similar briefs on a highly contextual site adjacent to the existing school buildings.
Students returned to their school scheme in Semester Two, looking in greater detail at pairs of classrooms through the spectrum of tectonics and environmental factors for three weeks. Resultant fine-tuning at this detail level was then incorporated into their original schemes.
The nature of the existing school site and its location in a provincial town were helpful in addressing the following:
- Adaptive re-use: the students were asked to evaluate existing buildings on the site for potential re-use, either in terms of a new fabric envelope; possible reclamation of building materials or complete demolition and the implications of such an approach.
- Life-cycle analysis: the students were asked to research the life cycle of the following materials with geospatial referencing:
- timber, steel, and stone, from their raw state, through appropriate preparation and subsequent fabrication prior to delivery to the site in Mallow.
- This led to a consideration of material selection for their school design schemes.
The project included site visits to sawmills, fabrication facilities, quarries, timber manufacturers etc. More emphasis on disassembly at the end of the building’s life. The topic that kept coming to the fore was what material to use if you can’t use concrete, when we should really be talking about an alternative to cement. Similarly there were numerous conversations about timber structural frames versus steel.
In the second stage of the project students looked at a specific part of their design, in closer detail, at a larger scale and through model-making and photography. We found the materials lectures presented by SAUL to be hugely beneficial.
